Armen got a toy archery set for Christmas one year. He could never quite get the arrows to fire right, so he stopped trying before long, and one day Cindy picked up the bow. What seemed cheap and dysfunctional in Armen’s hands suddenly seemed lethal under his little sister’s command. Armen was happy to transfer ownership of the archery set to Cindy. Mr. and Mrs. Adroushan figured that Cindy would make good use of proper equipment, so they wasted little time in upgrading her arsenal. Cindy spent hours each day with bow and arrow, and her mastery of the art advanced at a stunning pace. Her reputation spread across the Sink. Local event planners were soon booking Cindy whenever she was free. TV stations in Visalia and Fresno sent teams to Slough City to interview Cindy and her parents, and archery was suddenly as popular as roller-skating around Slough City.
Cindy’s first real bow had helped her become a serious archer, but she was soon in need of a serious bow; one that would give her more tension and thus more force. One weekend, Garegin took Cindy into a outdoorsman’s shop in Fresno where Cindy had a better bow fitted and some arrow shafts clipped and feathered. It was there that they met an archer who had driven down from his home on the Range to do some shopping and shop talk. Like many such shops, this one had an archery range, and the old archer had an opportunity to watch Cindy try out her new bow. He was awestruck by her quick mastery of the new bow, and he asked Garegin if he might be granted the honor of giving Cindy lessons on weekends. “She might just teach me a thing or three,” he conceded. He wouldn’t charge much, he vowed, because “it just wouldn’t seem right.”
Cindy loved to watch the arc of an arrow’s flight. The trajectory of an arrow was more to her than a straight line with a correction for gravity; it was a flight—a flight over a fence, through a hole in a bush, or between power lines. What others might call a target was just a convenient perch for what Cindy called her “birds.” And some of those perches weren’t even in sight. She sometimes directed her birds to land at some spot in a field, often a spot that was behind trees, shrubs, or high grass. She would sometimes have the birds land in patterns, and she could send them off with stunning rapidity. She released the arrows in rapid succession, with fluid motion—from quiver to set to release, not stopping to aim but seeming to use body posture, motion, and timing to guide her feathered friends.
After several years of archery, Cindy took to crafting bows and arrows herself. She’d been encouraged to try her hand at crafting arrows by the man that she met at the archery shop. “You’ll save money here that way,” he advised her, “so you can save up for a new bow when you outgrow that one.”
She tried different arrow materials, and even liked to search for real feathers for her birds. She even tried copper and steel tube, and just about any material she could craft into an arrow shaft.